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I posted this as a reddit comment and it was really well received, so I thought I'd post it here so it would be more linkable. A lot of people complain about "cabal hell" and ask what they can do to solve it. There are definitely things about the cabal/hackage ecosystem that can be improved, but on the whole it serves me quite well. I think a significant amount of the difficulty is a result of how fast things move in the Haskell community and how much more reusable Haskell is than other languages.

With that preface, here are my best practices that seem to make Cabal work pretty well for me in my development.

1. I make sure that I have no more than the absolute minimum number of packages installed as --global. This means that I don't use the Haskell Platform or any OS haskell packages. I install GHC directly. Some might think this casts too much of a negative light on the Haskell Platform. But everyone will agree that having multiple versions of a package insta…